Financial history series looks at world economies

Published Feb 22, 2013 at 12:44 pm
(Updated Feb 22, 2013 at 12:44 pm)

A facilitated program series entitled “The History and Impact of Financial Power – The Vampiric Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Financial Capitalism, 1868 to 2008” will be held at Mt. Lebanon Public Library beginning March 5. The series will be moderated by John Hemington, a retired attorney and IT director with more than 40 years’ independent study of economic and political power. In this series, group members will examine, evaluate and draw conclusions from the historical, political and economic roots of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 (GFC). They will attempt to determine whether the same processes, problems and structures which led to the Great Depression are related to the later events which triggered the GFC and evaluate the contribution of the economic establishment’s ideas, models and policy prescriptions, and their relationship to the ongoing turmoil in the world’s largest economies.

The program will meet the first Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m. Participation is free and an interest in this area of study is important – it will involve a commitment of time and a willingness to read three books on which the seminar is based: “Tragedy and Hope – A History of the World in Our Time” (1966), by Carroll Quigley; “The Gods of Money – Wall Street and the Death of the American Century” (2009), by F. William Engdahl; and “Debunking Economics – The Naked Emperor Dethroned” (Revised Edition, 2011), by Prof. Steve Keen. The texts are available for use at Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope” is a central focus of the project. The author is one of very few historians whose studies concentrated on the activities and operations of the world’s “power elite” in the 19th and 20th centuries and he is reputed to have been the only historian ever given unfettered access to the Archives of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller archives. Prior to his death in 1977, Quigley taught at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where one of his better known students was Bill Clinton, and he earlier taught at both Princeton and Harvard.

For more information on the program, contact Mt. Lebanon Public Library at 412-531-1912 or John Hemington at jehemington@verizon.net.